reading #99

AME AND THE TANGY ENERGETIC

life as lab

As a kid  I witnessed attributes and played with them.

What would happen when I misbehaved?

life as laboratory I tried lying and

got caught. tried being super

nice to people I don’t know

I tried bullying (after I myself was bullied)

I tried kissing my friends (without their consent)

I tried doing chores without being asked

not doing chores

fighting with fists

reading a book from beginning to end

without stopping

writing a book (age eleven)

If an adult caught me experimenting this way

I risked being earmarked based on my behavior.

This was called judgment and came very easy to them.

I tried it…

I learned not to trust adults

very well

they let me feel

innocent

I was a little kid with a heart full of feeling and a head full of up to no good. They let me feel innocent and sent me to bed much too early. Though I hated it and cried and fell asleep to their laughter and songs, I guess you could say I understood.

family

when you cannot see your family very often, and you see them, in flesh and blood, and get to embrace them, and hug the little ones and ruffle their hair, and look into those innocent eyes, and listen to them tell you stories, and tell them yours, in turn… nothing else compares, no, nothing else compares.

1984.kids

July came along and nobody knew our names
the fireworks were popping
no one could see them
they peppered our ears

we checked the sky
the powder had ignited
the oxygen burned
the paper falling to ground

after dark
we saw the snakes flying
umbrellas of light
the stars draped by the tails

slowly we recognized
who we were
motionless
cars and voices
and our names being called
in the night

cars and voices and our names
being called

motionless
in the night

our names
being called

– KatYa, 2017

the opening is tbd…

byo latchkey

we were…

latchkey kids. made deaf beneath

the wall of sound

of the industry

of the landscape
in the head

we played arcade games

to recover and chewed bubble

gum and drew on ourselves

with ballpoint pens

dumb kids. not stupid just

contextually thin

lacking or without sense or

the means to make

sense

hungry for relevance
starved of context

ignorant of our rights

we no longer studied our

country’s constitution

in high school

we microwaved tv dinners

and rode our bikes into the

night with duran duran baking

our heads by transistor

radio

stressed kids. the trance-like induction

of environmental stressors fill

the internal auditorium

teeming life of feelings acid-washed
a sensitive study of self
unreleased

abbreviated from an lp to an ep

the world stops when the record store is closed
the opening is tbd

you are all invited
statistics will be gathered

and fall upon us
with friends

new cokes slim jims leg warmers

byo latchkey

KatYa, 2017

not getting it ness

I fell into my own fantasy as a keeper of the flame for the children new to fresh books books books. Even fantasies have antagonists and she was a beast, she related well to the kids what with her smiles and false promises. They wanted what she did not have, and fresh matte finish covers became less attractive as the eyes tend to follow the shiny dangler. So what? An asshole relates quite well to other orifices, I imagine, and cannot recuse themselves from toxic flushing, outlyers from anywhere life might thrive. I could only bring a few around to the treasures of reading, but we could proliferate from there. You know, kids tell other kids about a book and soon everyone is reading it. That was the best aspect of my fantasy. Funny how it used to be a reality, back in the Harry Potter days, the Chronicles of Narnia Days. These children were born with google roadmaps of life, and Marvel movies where once we had comic books. Maybe if I pulled the old trading card trick and attached sticks of bubble gum to the spine. Anything to greet them with language and keep them from falling into her world, the common unconscious of not getting-it-ness. Fighting for space. Craving intimacy. Technologically sound. Animals equipped with smart phones doing three quarters their mental work for them. Grades by emojis and trading in texts, subjugated to a subhuman comment thread without end. I don’t even consider her subjects of the same genus as we. I just see elephant seals fumbling about for dying, flopping fish. Mammals with computers and electric outlets. Mall grubbing video grabbers. Android celluloid.

chalk it off

chalk it off as existential slowburn -ii

… i dont know how to write this. i want to think before i write, but i cannot. i want to treat this
with the attention it requires. the gravity it inspires. the sensitivity it needs. i am even now
holding back from trying to rush to disagree with you on some of your points you made,
because i do feel differently, yes, and thats okay, yes. however, i cannot disagree with your
overall vision. because this is also what i see. atleast i think our visions of us are pretty
much alike. it doesnt matter if they are or they aren’t, though. i truly believe that.

god i feel like im in church all of a sudden. because my spirit is aching. i feel my spirit through
my body in that powerful way like i did on the best sundays in the earliest 1980s, when my family
was a young family, the 4 of us were tight, we had a big old queene anne victorian to tear around
in, a big old lawn wrapping around her, and a little peke-a-poo dog named buttons. its fur was like
the worst case of jerry curls when she was just a pup. my moms radiant joyfulness at having
all of us together singing hymns on sunday, well, it just filled us up, also. but my dad wasnt
really into it. so the kids werent either. so looking back its an aching kind of spirit i felt …

kids

we were kids we carried book bags we threw rocks at each other for fun we drank milk and ate cookies and laughed crumbs and stamped them out with our kicks with our boots with our sneaks with our heels with our might, we cried and we raged and we kissed — harmlessly — and if the winters storms had blustered and the snow had fallen and melted and then frozen overnight well it would break loose when we thundered down on it and you could hear the earth cracking under us and we laughed fearless, convinced we would never ever never ever never ever ever ever, die

lost in books

When I was a little kid and the youngest of my family, I remember there was a lot of safety in intimacy I mean touch, there was a lot of playful gripping and holding and caressing and embracing, playful fighting and running and pushing and pulling, between kids and kids and adults and kids and friends and cousins and kids and family, there was a lot of charging and edging and rolling and rough handling of me, picking me up and tossing me in the air, or letting me get on your back or sit up on top of your shoulders when I was young enough to be light enough to be carried that way to be held that way to be safe that way and those days were so wonderful they could not last long enough. There was even a sad time somewhere when I could not reach out to you – nor you me – and I knew not what to do with myself, only get lost in my books.